


Last Rest

by lemonsharks



Series: Every Terrible, Necessary Choice [7]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Adults acting like adults, Angst, Competent Alistair, Enthusiastic Consent, F/M, Healthy Relationships, Kissing, Lots of kissing, Post-Here Lies the Abyss, Promises, Reunions, Romance, Search for a Cure, actual problems with no easy answers, cure for the calling, reasonable disagreements, unconventional wedding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-02
Updated: 2015-07-02
Packaged: 2018-04-07 07:46:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4255140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lemonsharks/pseuds/lemonsharks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two Wardens, long-parted, meet on the road to Weisshaupt. Reunion isn't as easy as either of them would have hoped.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Last Rest

**Author's Note:**

> 10,000 thanks to my truly amazing betas, darthfruitbasket & thievinghippo--this story would be 2,200 words shorter and formed into an entirely different shape without your input, and *makes inchoherent gestures*
> 
> I apologize in advance for any heartbreak. This was _supposed_ to be a short, cute, post-Adamant reunionfic and then...this happened. They do get a happy ending! Eventually! 
> 
> Serelle Cousland exists in the same [worldstate](http://www.lemonsharks.net/dacanonws) as Jona Hawke and Mercy Trevelyan. (Also, some of us who left Alistair in the Wardens wanted to play with [this alternate concept art](https://41.media.tumblr.com/c3d617f39377da0d007ba2a431c80aff/tumblr_inline_nod7lxxibN1qziuim_540.png), too. WOW.)

Trouble was, Alistair had never actually _been_ to Weisshaupt and _turn right at the Colossus of Orlais and feed the horse to anything that tries to eat you_ only went so far. He scratched his courser on the neck, promising he would never do that; mare slowed from a trot to a walk.

The horse was excessively well-behaved, which he supposed was no great surprise from Master Dennet's stables, or from the hand of the Inquisitor herself. The girl had chased him down after he turned north from Adamant Fortress. She'd had a halter and lead in one hand and an unfastened bridle in the other, the animal trotting to keep up with her.

"You aren't planning to _walk_ , are you?"

A stupid joke had formed and died in the back of his throat. Hawke would have made the joke anyway, if he'd been back—well, _there_ —facing—facing things it was no use trying to contemplate.

"I wanted to be away quickly, Your Worship."

Trevelyan had rolled her eyes and turned from him to the horse, started working buckles and straps to exchange the halter for bridle and reins.

"This girl is called Smudge," she had said. "She's my personal mount, and she's served me very well. She's also kitted up for a long journey already—no, stop it, you'll need as much help as you can get. And don't you _dare_ die. _You're_ our Commander of the Grey, and the Inquisition can't afford to lose you after—"

She had stopped and raked a hand through her hair. _After_.

Maker, she couldn't be any older than—well, if _he'd_ charged into saving the world at twenty, he couldn't very well get all judgey in his dotage when he found himself swearing fealty to another child doing the same. So he took the horse and he felt old and weary and empty right between his lungs, turned away with a bow from the saddle and hoped, as all travelers in Thedas do, that nothing too big to handle alone encountered him while hungry.

The big thing, not himself, obviously.

He'd lost count of the days he'd been riding. It had been at least nine since he'd seen another person.

Up ahead, smoke curled out of a pair of chimney-stacks. If he were lucky, that meant the inn called the Last Rest, which meant he'd reach the end of his journey inside a fortnight. Friendly people and a hot meal and a bath, too, but that wasn't as important. If he were unlucky, he'd need to be ready for a fight. Alistair dismounted before he crested the rise, loosened his sword in the scabbard, and settled his shield on his arm.

His gear had been Duncan's, once, and neither sword nor shield had failed him since he took them up. 

The Rest did not appear to be crawling with Venatori or demons or any of the other monsters he'd heard of, encountered, smacked in the face or run from, screaming. 

A girl in the half-full stables took Smudge and a handful of silver, promised she would clean his tack and that the farrier saw his mount before he left.

She said, "There's rooms still, or you can camp out by the creek if you fancy."

"I fancy a _bed_ enough that I should be here for at least a couple of days."

This place was a rickety three-story affair, with a bathing room down in the basement and two floors with rooms big enough to turn around in atop the taproom, a bar and a kitchen and the owners' children running back and forth with trays of beer and bread and cheese, roast and boiled meats and vegetables. Alistair paid for his room, bath, and supper, then put away his things himself. Getting _clean_ , he decided, was more pressing than getting fed. He went downstairs for a scrub and changed into the freshest set of clothes he had, and returned to take a place by the hearth.

It got damned cold at night in wasted places, and you knew the Anderfels by how the sun couldn't cling to the ground after dark. He leaned back against the wall; the fire warmed the stone and the stone warmed _him_. It was a good place if he needed to bolt—he could overturn the table as a distraction, leap the bar, escape out the kitchen door and be gone in twenty seconds flat if he needed to. He'd pulled just that sort of escape before.

Not that he would need to now. Nobody was left to chase him—they'd all either died or been absorbed into the Inquisition. Still, he'd traded the blue and silver for something less conspicuous and given up on shaving somewhere in the Hissing Wastes. Water was too precious a thing out there to throw away on cosmetic details. And if it kept any Wardens away who hadn't been informed that his head was no longer wanted apart from his body, so much the better. 

He could feel a couple of them nearby, and decided not to seek them out for expediency's sake. What he needed was nothing less than an audience with the First Warden, and no lone travelers could give him that.

What he _had_ was a few days in a semblance of civilization, and a good view of the denizens of the Anderfels.

Alistair spotted mercenary company at two of the tables by the door; they were into their cups but not dangerous, not angry, not yet. A woman and an elf idled by the bar; a couple of families took tables far-off from the mercs; a miner and his partner measured out gold dust and weighed nuggets in an alcove near the stairs.

People coming, people going, not one who gave half a damn about his story. It was better if they didn't. Food and mead came with a girl who watched him beneath lowered lashes and stammered over her words. He gave his thanks and dug in with abandon, the curl of hunger stronger than he thought it ought to be, though he'd only had stale bread, salt beef, and water so far today.

A couple of men from the merc tables moved over to the fire and started up a game of dice; a grandfather from one of the families shuffled the littlest children up to bed. Alistair said nothing to nobody while he ate his haunch of nug and boiled greens and buttered bread with honey. The elf at the bar left, too, with a lengthy goodbye; her voice was musical, and it carried, but her half of her words were Dalish and he didn't understand them.

The woman, for her part, stretched and rolled her shoulders, shifting from foot to foot as she did, before she went back to nursing her drink. She moved in a way that set him missing all over again.

 _Someday_ , he promised himself silently, _someday we'll be in the same place at the same time again, and when that day comes..._ But for now, he carried her last letter with him, folded down and tucked into a secret pocket on the inside of his left vambrace. As close to his heart as he could go and still pull the missive out to read without stripping down in the field. _Will you be disappointed in me, Serelle? When you find out I've lost some of the old romanticism?_

The woman finished her drink, turned halfway, and scanned the room. Alistair applied his attention to the remains of his mead. He wished he had a book, but hadn't thought to bring one, and up til now he'd been too exhausted every night to worry about petty things like entertainment. When he looked up, she looked away, left the bar, and joined a game of cards with the mercs.

She was one of them, then: no small wonder she carried herself like a fighter, that the build was right. The coloring, too, but there were a lot of women with her warm brown complexion and nearly-black hair. The woman wore hers in a single shirt plait; Serelle's had never been cut.

The woman tipped her head in a laugh and took her comrades' money with the ease of long practice. The dice game ended, and those two went back to join the cards.

Alistair gritted his teeth; the remains of the nug was less appealing cold, and he doubted sleep would come as easily tonight as it had just after Adamant, with the false Calling cut off all at once. She would have felt it, too. She would have lain her head down on her pillow, or her own arms, and slept the night through, dreamless.

They should have been together, for that.

But if they had been, she would've charged into the fortress at his side; she would have pushed him and Hawke both through the breach herself. He could hear the words she would've said even now: _You only need the_ one _Warden, Inquisitor._

The ghosts had seen were his own, but also hers: Loghain and Rendon Howe around every corner, their whispers abundant, uncreative, horrifying.

For now, knowledge that as of a year ago she was alive and well enough to write would have to do. _It's not enough_.

He looked up, and caught the woman watching him. She looked away, and told what must have been quite a funny joke; half the mercs laughed and the others groaned. "And it seems, gentlemen," she said, pitching her voice as one would across a battlefield, "that I've taken rather more of your money. It's been a great pleasure."

Her accent was one that never left, straight out of Highever.

It couldn't be her. She had no reason to be here.

 _Do I even_ remember _your voice?_

Alistair stood and crossed the room. She watched him as he did, through the corner of one eye, while she shuffled and dealt. He waited through the hand—a loss, but one taken in good humor. Coin was redistributed, cards passed to a new dealer.

He touched her shoulder lightly and drew away. He was rather relieved to find he did not have a knife embedded in his kidney or a sword tip at his throat, mercenary or otherwise. That kind of life made people twitchy.

"Begging my lady's pardon," he said, and had to swallow back a knot. "But you remind me a great deal of someone I know."

Her eyes were _blue_ ; her eyes were _her_ eyes; her nose _her_ nose; her lips those he had kissed a thousand times.

A scar ran through one brow—that was new; Serelle wasn't vain of her appearance so much as lucky in where blades and shield-edges hit home upon her body. New silver in her hair, new lines at the corners of her eyes, around her mouth, but he had both of those as well.

She drew a breath, which shook, and cleared her throat before she spoke next.

"Ser, I was having just the same thought. But what business does an ex-Templar out of Ferelden have in this wretched part of the world?"

No one else could have known that; all of those who ever had were scattered to the four winds or dead. 

She watched him intently from where she sat, and twisted in the chair. Serelle leaned toward him, her eyes wide and fixed on his, her brow creased. She did not breathe, but her grin showed teeth; she was playing with him, Alistair realized.

He licked his lips—dry now, when had that happened?—and she let her eyes close slowly and open again. She gripped the arm of her chair.

"I'm delivering a message for a friend," he said, joining her game. "A letter of a _personal nature_ reached me, by way of a Lady Trevelyan, and I thought to return the favor in kind."

She nodded once, and spoke to the mercenaries now. "You'll forgive me for sitting out the next hand," she said— _Serelle_ said—to the men and women gathered, "But more pressing matters have arisen, and—"

She turned as she rose, the chair still between them, and rather than make a scene (oh, how he wanted to make the scene!), he took her hand and kissed her knuckles, relished her skin's warmth against his, and led the way to the stairs.

They made the first landing before she shoved him into the corner, buried her fingers in hair that had grown long enough to drag him down with. He turned his head aside and laid kisses over the corner of her mouth, her jaw, her throat. He kissed the point of her pulse again and again; he stole away her breath and savored the beating of her heart beneath his tongue.

Hands on his arms, on his shoulders, half the size of his own but _strong_ , pushed him back. "Hey—Alistair, you great tease—I'm up _here_ —"

He stopped her with his lips over hers, tasted salt and dark ale, the wet tip of her tongue, let his hands roam over her for the first time in far too long. He pulled her shirt free of her trousers with the one and cupped her bottom with other, and she _laughed. S_ he also pulled away, darted up the stairs, and beckoned him from the top. Maker, he hadn't seen her smile for nearly three years and she was _here_ , framed by light from the sconces in the hall, laughing with a joy he hadn't known still existed in the world.

Serelle toyed with the hem of her shirt while he stood there, slack-jawed and wanting. He cleared his throat and took the steps two at a time, took her in his arms and murmured that he would never let her go again. Alistair felt the back of his own shirt bunch in her fists, and he moved off just enough to look at her again, beautiful with her mussed hair and her crinkled eyes.

She swallowed hard, jerked her head over her shoulder.

"Please tell me you have a room to yourself, or so help me, I'll have you right here—"

And she stood on her toes, took his face between her hands and his lips beneath her lips; their teeth scraped, cracked. His words were gone but his feet moved of their own volition, and the two of them collided with the wall, with each other. 

Alistair gave a laugh of his own, this one thing _finally_ set to right.

He couldn't say how he found his room, but it was _his_ armor on the rack, the contents his saddlebags strewn over the table and chair by the brazier. The door slammed shut with the force of their bodies against it, a wonder the thing didn't break altogether. Then it was all fumbling hands and need—too much clothing, not enough light, just what shone under the door and from the partially-lit moons out the window. A cord snapped and something small and glass hit the floor with a click and rolled away.

Serelle caught his hand in hers, and he stopped, pressed their foreheads together. Her breath fell in short puffs, her pupils huge. She turned his hand in hers, never breaking her gaze, and kissed the center of his palm. Slipped a band onto his finger, silverite engraved with prophet's laurel. Her father's ring, that she'd worn beside her Oath for years, that she'd tried for months, long ago, to give back to her brother. He saw she wore its twin when she twined their fingers together, and his insides—flipped, twisted.

A decade ago if she had asked, if she'd asked like _this_ , he'd have taken the throne and the kingdom and burned every last ounce of fear he had of the word _Majesty_ on reverent lips, but he wasn't the same man today as he had been. He was not the man he was when she had driven her sword into the Archdemon's skull, not as he was when she let him have his satisfaction against Loghain.

He rubbed his nose against the side of hers, kissed each of her eyelids—gentle, fleeting—her forehead, her lips again. She broke away, and he followed a moment, and she rested her cheek against his shoulder.

"I want to say something huge and grand and—and thank you for not being dead."

Alistair kissed her again, and how many nights had he dreamed this, had he hoped for it? He took her bottom lip between his teeth, and was rewarded with a gasp, sharp and small and just as he remembered. He kept up, now straining against his trousers, acutely aware of her deft fingers working the laces loose and, because clearly she could still to do seven things at once, getting her own undone with her other hand. He palmed her breasts beneath her shirt, the curve of her waist, her shoulders; she stroked him through his underclothes and smirked against his mouth. 

The six feet between them and the bed became an uncrossable chasm.

 _Now._ They had time, later they would _have_ time, they would have _years_ , but now could _not_ wait. 

"Now—" the word was a growl, half-swallowed, rough. 

She pushed his smalls down his thighs and he tugged hers aside, took himself in hand. She wrapped one leg around his hip, back arching; he worked his thumb between them, shaking and probably too rough. Serelle met him with sighs and keening notes and her lips on his throat, beneath his jaw, the only sound between them _please_ , and the snap her her hips. Strong hands and fingernails in his skin, and everything was too quick, too frenzied; he wouldn't last and he _couldn't_ slow—not now, not after years spent waiting. 

Alistair opened his eyes and murmured her name against her lips, pleaded that she look at him, that she come for him, soon, _now_ —

She whimpered and took his between them, moved it _up_ a fraction, and with the right pressure and scrape with the edge of his nail she shuddered through her release a few moments before he reached his own. 

He was sure that she'd put bruises on his arms where she held fast.

He pulled away moments later, and drew her toward his bed. They shed clothing piece by piece, learning the new scars and dents and remembering old ones. Speaking in murmurs and hums and fingers on skin. He'd forgotten—how had he forgotten?—the freckles on her arms and breasts and belly, the spray of them over her nose. He decided, right there, to kiss every one of them—if it took him all night, if it took him _three_.

Alistair had got halfway down her stomach when she tugged him back up by the hair.

"Is something...wrong?"

He wanted her spread out beneath him, her legs thrown over his shoulders, fingers in his hair and his name on her lips but they had time, they had time, they had _time_.

"No, everything is—it's just too _much_ , right now. Wait a little?"

He nodded, and held her close, and felt her, felt all of her. He said, "You're shaking."

"I am—I—"

"I'd say 'don't,' but I doubt that would do any good."

Another laugh, this one small, followed by a stretch and the crack of her spine. Serelle tapped him lightly on the cheek, and took his chin between her thumb and fingers. She studied his face, shivering every now and then, and he wished fervently that the brazier in the corner would light itself without either of them having to _move_.

Instead, he shifted, and so did she, in the wordless dance of _how-do-we-get-the-blankets-to-go-from-under-us-to-on-us-no-no-apparently-not-like-that_. She draped her leg between his when they were done, curled up on her side with her arms around him and her head on his shoulder, as she had every night they spent in the chill of the Frostbacks a decade ago. Really, the only thing missing was the mabari laying across their legs while their feet went to sleep.

She rested her hand on the side of his face and touched the ridge of his cheek with her thumb. It tickled him beneath his beard, and he felt his lips twitch into a grin. Her hand was cold, and he caught it between both of his, and warmed her fingers with his breath.

"I didn't recognize you tonight," she said, low-voiced. Her other hand crept up behind the back of his skull. "I like it. 'S… good."

"I didn't think you could be you either. I didn't dare hope that you were," he replied. "And I missed you. Every day. "

"Wouldn't be right if only one of us was miserable."

"But you promised you'd come back."

Only her breath had eased with sleep, and she snuggled close against him, and for a moment, everything was right.

When Alistair woke, it was to dreams of the change from second to third watch interrupted by shrieks, and frantic kisses, lips and teeth and noses that didn't fit quite perfectly together. And when he woke, really _woke_ , it was to blue eyes so close to his, a plea in her voice: _be real, be real, please be real_ , and a single burning lantern on the shelf by the bed. To his love's fingers digging into his hip, just the other side of painful.

" _Ow_ , stop that, please," he said, trying for levity and hoping, hoping he got it right. "We're both real; we're both here, in my bed—" he continued, quietly—how late was it?—and he inched up til he was sitting, leaning back against the wall.

She followed him, knelt beside him with the blankets drawn around her shoulders like a cloak. A breath, unsteady. Her cheeks were wet; he dried them with his fingertips. Another breath, this one more even, before she replied.

"I dreamed I woke up at the Vigil, with the Calling still in my head and nothing even started—I dreamed the day I left, and—"

Maybe it meant nothing, maybe it meant the Nightmare's return. Those questions could wait until morning at least, as troubling as they were.

Serelle climbed onto his lap, and really, what more instruction did he need? 

_The questions will keep._

Now, he loved her til they were both sated, both shaking with their own slaked need, both too spent for fear. She tucked her body against his once more, this time with his arm thrown over her ribcage and her head beneath his chin, and they both slept through til morning. If he dreamed the echoes of Loghain's voice, of Howe's, he did not remember them when the first sunlight cracked through the shuttered window.

  
  


Left to his own devices, Alistair would've slept til noon every day of his life. Up before dawn and about before the rest of the world was one of the many things he'd resented about the Templar order; one of the few things that had chafed about working under Master Dennet at Redcliffe; and one of the only things he would have changed about the Wardens.

Most mornings at the Vigil he'd been apt to find the blankets stripped from the bed and his pants dropped unceremoniously on his face, Serelle's mabari racing up and down the hallway, barking alarm at everyone on the senior Wardens' residential floor.

On the road, you got up before the people chasing you and you bedded down after they tired out and you hoped you'd kept whatever lead you had. The void-kissed cave in Crestwood was the longest time he'd spent in one place since he took his stand and fled.

This morning, he woke to aching muscles and the sound of a knife through an apple skin. It was a full-waking, a soldier's waking: eyes open, wits present and accounted for. He eased himself up one one elbow. Serelle had bathed and dressed and sat cross-legged on the chair by the brazier, both lamps lit, and the room a little too warm for their burning.

"You let me sleep in," he said, with wonder in his voice. She was _here_ , close enough to touch, and smiling in her quiet way. "Has that _ever_ happened?"

"Not that I remember, but a dust storm kicked up a little after dawn. Nobody's going anywhere today."

"Mm," he said. Alistair would have gone on, but his stomach rumbled and she tossed him an apple from the bowl resting on the table beside her. She'd brought fruit and cold roast nug, fresh bread with honey and jam, a cured sausage of an unidentifiable but surely delicious origin, and a pot of steaming spiced tea to wash it down.

Any closer to Weisshaupt and the fruit wouldn't grow, the game wouldn't have anything to graze on, and all bees you'd find were the ones you brought yourself in sealed jars. Serelle retrieved his trousers from where they'd fallen last night, balled them up, and tossed them over to him.

Pants, and breakfast, and then planning their next move. He addressed two of the three at once by pulling his trousers on with the apple clamped between his teeth.

Alistair could work on his own; he'd had to, these last years, and he could pull ideas and choices that didn't break the world out his arse as well as anyone. He still _preferred_ company, though, and partnership. Hawke showing up with no warning and a gaggle of folk she described as, "Varric's people, and decent enough" in tow had been a blessing. He missed _people_ in general, and his time at Skyhold had let him _rest_ if little else.

But Hawke was dead, and any chance that he would get her in the same room as Serelle was left behind with her in the Fade. He'd wanted to see them circle one another like unfamiliar dogs, before they started wagging their metaphorical tails and bounded off on some ill-conceived adventure.

That would've been the result of such a meeting, he was sure of it.

_Clean up the Wardens, right the wrongs, pull the weeds. Mourn when you're done._

Alistair pulled the the table over, sloshing some of the tea out of Serelle's mug, and they ate as Wardens ate: in silence, with abandon, and ever-alert for dangers that might pop up out of the ground. She tore a crust of bread into smaller and smaller pieces. Halved, halved again, til nothing but crumbs was left on her plate.

The thrum of another Warden nearby was missing.

He'd been so caught up in his shock, in his joy, in his need, last night that he hadn't noticed it. Or he had—he might have—but if so, he'd cast the question aside. _Later; we have time_.

"I can't feel you," he said. Put down the food in his hand.

Serelle _giggled_ , a bubbling laugh he'd heard only a handful of times, always on visits from her brother and her nieces. She looked smug as a cat.

"I know. I was waiting for you to notice before I told you the news—I can't feel you either. I can see you there, I can touch you, but it's like touching any other man. "

For a moment he considered making light— _Hey!_ or _I can show you exactly how I'm_ not _like any other man._ A year ago, two years, three: perhaps then he would have. She slipped a hand into her pocket and out again, fingers wrapped loosely around something small.

He said, "Go on."

"What we sense in one another is—it's our shared Taint. You can't feel me because mine is gone, and I don't feel you because I don't have it myself anymore. I found a cure for it. Well, I found Merrill, and she _created_ a cure for it, but—"

Alistair crossed his arms over his bare chest, his mouth slightly open and his lips downturned, brows drawn together. Serelle's smile wavered.

In the weeks after she left, he came to believe the cure a fool's errand. 

She'd had such faith it could be done, enough to bolster his own at the time, but not enough to make him _believe_ , not after she was gone. In her absence he had lain awake at night, had sought her wherever his assignments led him, and for what? She might have been dead any time.

He had cursed her and wept for her and determined he would find her and pin her against a wall and never let her from his sight again. Every day was a day wasted, a day less, before they lost themselves to their duty.

When you were Joined it was supposed to be for the rest of your life, til the end of the Wardens' need of you. You fought until you couldn't anymore, and when you died you made sure it counted for something. _And how well has that worked out for us?_

He swallowed, hard, before he asked, "How?"

"Alistair, you won't like it."

" _How_?"

She looked much as she had at twenty-two, leaning over her desk in the Commander's office at the Vigil, with her head in her hands and her mabari whining at her side. Always determined, always full of hope, but expecting one person to be three had been too much, with little time for grief and none for healing. She had locked herself inside the room and said she would come out when all her was work done. _All_ her work.

He and Nate had taken her door off its hinges in the smallest siege Ferelden had ever seen. They'd refused to leave _or_ to return the door til she shared the weight of her responsibility: for Amaranthine, and for the Wardens there. 

She looked as she had when she'd given in, then. A weight gone from her and a light in her small smile.

Serelle uncurled her fingers.

The vial which had contained her Oath lay empty in her hand, the seal broken and rewrapped in silver wire. Alistair took it from her, held it at arm's length, turned the glass between his fingers. Clean but clouded, scratched and battered, once separated from its chain and dropped down a crevasse in Orzammar. Serelle had insisted they delay to retrieve it.

He had loved her all the more for that devotion; Morrigan had rolled her eyes and muttered about fools and idiots and held the rope.

"I answered the questions Merrill had, and she worked backward through our secrets to a solution."

Every day before this one he would have been angry about revealing _Warden secrets_ , but-and today it only set a twinge behind his eyes. Serelle was forthright; she was honest; she didn't obfuscate or misdirect. Those traits had earned them both as many enemies as they did friends.

He said, "You aren't answering the question I _asked_ you."

"The Oath is—no, that's not it. The _Joining_ and the Oath are—the one is a failsafe for reversing the other. In case we need to. In case—I don't quite understand it myself, but it _works_! Will you listen to me, it _works_ , it buys us fifty or sixty more years instead of ten or twenty and—"

"Your friend Merrill. Is she—"

"I met her in Antiva and helped her drive a herd of halla down to Kirkwall. After that, I stayed with her in the Alienage and loomed behind her when she needed me to, and she worked on my puzzle by night. When she was fairly sure she had something that _would_ work, we tried it out. On me."

Alistair rolled that story over and, really, could the world be so small?

She was just across the Waking Sea for how long? She was hiding in the dust of the Kirkwall Chantry, one more Ferelden refugee?

She'd been close enough to seek, close enough to find, walking streets he had run through himself while the Qunari burned the city to the ground and Hawke begged him and his to stay and do some good. And she never wrote a letter, never posted a note that she was _safe_? 

He couldn't think of that now. 

Alistair bit his lip before he spoke next. "Is she _Hawke's_ Merrill?"

"She spoke of a woman by that name. Once or twice."

"Maker damn us all, Serelle, she's a _blood mage_."

"And the Joining is blood magic! Of a kind, in its most essential form. Or did _yours_ not involve gulping down a pint you took from the throat of the first darkspawn you killed?"

"You might have been possessed, you might have died!"

"I was dying _already_!" 

Years and years ago they had sworn, when they were a couple of young and silly fools, that they would never spend a day apart. That was the kind of promise you set yourself up to break by saying the words out loud. 

But years and years ago, he had meant it—really _meant_ it. Denerim had quieted and Anora had ordered half a company of her remaining soldiers to remove the Archdemon's corpse from Fort Drakon. Morrigan had... _gone_. 

They were twenty and immortal with all the world before them, then. The whisperings of darkspawn eased with the last victorious fanfare, leaving nothing but the memory of a headache behind. _I was dying already_. 

And desperate enough to trade the years they _had_ for the ones they _might_ , pouring water into the wastes. Wretched enough to spill her own blood for it. 

They had grown; they had spent nights apart, hundreds of them, while she planned and ordered and by he led men against the last straggling monsters of the Blight. Every day he was afield was one more hurlock's sword that could slip between his ribs. Every night she spoke her mind in Denerim or Amaranthine City was one more cup of poison she might drink. Death followed them to bed at night and woke curled around them both every morning.

She'd been formed into a warrior, a general; Alistair had been trained up a soldier. A man made for guarding dreadful things, for burning back the horrors of the world, chasing them on deliberate feet until they fell. 

Gooseflesh raised on his neck at the thought of it, the idea of a demon lurking, boiling under her skin—even without a Templar's vows, Alistair would know a man possessed. He'd got into the habit of pretending stupidity long ago, but he learned quickly and he _remembered_ , could recognize the things he _didn't_ understand.

You could feel the trace of a demon in your veins: not all that different from darkspawn, really. You could feel them growing near you, feeding, unstable as a pot about to boil over. 

There was no possession, here. 

There might have been.

Now, Serelle stood and shoved the chair back into the wall. She stumbled over one of the table-legs and an apple, half eaten and forgotten, rolled off and hit the floor. She walked from the door to the bed and back, looked from him to the window to the far wall, and choked on a sound before she found her shaking words again. 

"I was dying, like you're dying now. How many years do we have left? We're Blight Wardens, we killed the Archdemon ourselves, we—"

"I met my son." He couldn't say why he'd said _that_ except to make her _stop_. She did, and he continued because if he didn't she would _ask_ things. "When I at Skyhold. Lady Trevelyan brought Morrigan back with her from Halamshiral."

"Oh," Serelle said. She halted mid-stride and sat beside him, far enough apart they didn't touch.

Alistair pushed the table away.

She drummed her fingers on her knee without rhythm or tune. 

Morrigan had always been _her_ friend, her ally, her partner in sneaky plots and whatever else they talked about into the breaking dawn as the campfire burned low and the crickets stopped their singing while the songbirds took up theirs.

"How is she?"

"Well. Less of an insufferable menace than she was, if you'll believe that."

_He knows you're a good man._

"And the boy?"

"Kieran is—." Even now, his son's name sounded out of place when spoken in his voice. "He's odd. But so was I, at ten. I can't actually lay the blame for that at Morrigan's feet. He has my nose, or he will when he finishes growing, the poor thing. Her eyes. Cleverer than I would have dared imagine."

"I wish I had been there with you," she said, after a time had passed.

The dust storm had brought a second night down on the Rest, and the lamps burned low and stifling.

Alistair knew men who said their children saved their lives; he'd fought beside them, he'd sent them to the Deep Roads when their time came. He'd written of their bravery to sons and daughters, wives and lovers.

And what did he have to say of his own child, bright and eager to hare off after the hundreds of things that interested him but quiet and serious otherwise? The boy was a stranger, who'd led a strange life, but then: _so had he_. For ten years Alistair had put the _possibility_ of him away, a transaction, a consequence not to be considered, and how did he compare with his own sire in _that_?

Better to not tread on such unsteady ground. 

Not with so much work still undone.

"You should know that I've pledged the Wardens to the Inquisition's cause. I've made promises that I'm bound by duty and necessity to keep," Alistair said, instead. Because this was easy, this was familiar, this oath he could speak in his sleep. _In war, victory_ , and they had a hell of a way to go before they had a chance of winning anything. "I have no right to a cure, not now, even if it wasn't the work of—Wardens don't abandon their duty."

Serelle didn't speak for a long while. When she did, she looked at the wall rather than at him.

"Wardens don't hold land or titles, but I was Arlessa of Amaranthine for seven years; _you_ got about three inches away from being King of Ferelden. Wardens don't accept honors, but there are statues with _our names_ on them in Denerim and Redcliffe. You and I do a lot of things that _Wardens_ generally don't. And you—you're drawing the line at a cure?"

"At a cure _now_ —you weren't at Adamant, you can't _know_ —"

"Not if you don't tell me."

Alistair flinched, though she hadn't raised her voice.

Serelle turned where she sat, hands folded on the bed, one leg tucked beneath her. More quietly, she said, "Everything was _fine_ when we left Kirkwall. As fine as Kirkwall ever gets, I mean. Please. What happened?"

And so he told her. He started with the morning she had left for elsewhere and he for Denerim, their parting on the road and their promise to meet in that same place in a year's time. _Her_ promise that her quest couldn't take any longer than that. And he went on: Anora, the withdrawal from the Vigil, the interference he'd met in Orlais, in Clarel. He told her of running, of nights without sleep, weeks-long detours around entrances to the Deep Roads, too numerous to count.

He spoke of the old friends who had turned away from him, the new ones who had become his allies, Hawke and the Inquisitor and the few dozen Wardens who came to their senses when they finally learned the truth. Livius Erimond and his blood magic; Corypheus who wouldn't die; the Archdemon that was not actually, he hoped, an Archdemon.

They had not killed the creature, and if another Blight came out of the hole in the sky—.

Alistair said nothing of the things he had seen in the Fade, fears of men long dead and destinies that would never come to pass. 

What right did he have to a cure built from corrupting magic? What right did either of them have in the shadow of all that had happened?

Serelle was right; he _didn't_ like how she had come into her second chance. He didn't know whether he ever would, but he chose to rest on duty over spite today.

He said, "I'm the most senior Warden left in the south. Fixing this falls on me."

"Commander of the Grey in Ferelden," Serelle replied, soft and sharp and sad. She raised her hand, palm out, as if to signal a question or demand momentary silence from her men. "I outrank you. I could take the burden from you, share it with you. I could order you to let me."

"You aren't a Warden anymore."

"I see," she said. She stood, then, and gathered her shoes. Stilled her shaking hands and padded to the door on silent feet.

Hurt wrapped around her like a garment, and different words, a better explanation—they wouldn't help, would they? _You can sew up a cut but you can't put the blood you've drawn back where it ought to go._ But he had to _try_.

"You don't have the standing you need to affect any change with the Wardens. They won't listen, and they must. _Listen_."

"You think I can't fight without the Taint singing in my head? That I won't?"

"It isn't _that_ ," he began, and she _laughed_ at him.

_Is this what it looks like when you turn away a miracle, a storm of a woman beside you and an unmarked path ahead?_

With every word he said she tensed a little more.

If he said he hadn't meant it, hadn't known the quiet accusation would pierce her, would strike her like a blow, well. She would see a lie there, tangled up with all the truth of love and absence and the pressing need of a world that hadn't given them anything back for the labor they'd poured in. 

You didn't spend a so many years of your life with with a person and come away not knowing how to hurt them best. 

What to say so that no apology would do. 

She'd _gone_ and he hated that she had and what was he reaping for it, now?

Serelle spoke at the door, face turned from him, eyes down. "I _have_ been to Weisshaupt before. And I _will_ be continuing on there. We need to look into their records to see if there's any precedent—but you wouldn't care about that, would you? You need your _standing_. If you want to come with us, we'll be leaving as soon as we can ride out."

Alistair nodded, once. _Fifty years, sixty_ , and how had they gone from all the time in the world to none in five words and an empty vial?

"I shouldn't have said—"

"No," she said, stopping him. "Why regret the truth? It'll cut us both to ribbons, but it's not changing just because we'd prefer it were different. So are you coming with us, or not?"

She rested one hand on the door, the fingers of her other hand clenched around her shoes, her knuckles ashen and her mouth a thin line.

"I would be glad of the company," he said. The words were acrid, and colder than he'd wanted them to sound.

"Well, then. Good."

And Serelle left. She closed the door softly behind her.

Alistair took his vambrace from the rack and pulled her letter out. 


End file.
